Yoga helps practitioners become more aware of their body through a variety of yoga poses. These yoga poses counteract the bad habits of everyday life in which people have a tendency to fall into bad postures, such as slumping, slouching or swaying, whether the body is at rest or in motion. Yoga poses are designed to bring awareness of how to align muscles equitably around the skeletal structure and align the networks of connective tissue and nervous tissue so that they are positioned optimally to perform at their best.
When the foundational body part muscles, mostly hands and feet, but not excluding, forearms, backs or legs, are connected to the yoga mat, the muscles of the supporting limbs can fully engage. The connective tissues that start at the body's extremities become switched on and sets off a biomechanical chain reaction that activates their connecting muscles and tissue to evenly align around the body's skeletal structure. As a result, strength and endurance is accessible. Trapped connective tissue, such as blood vessels, and trapped nervous tissue caused by misaligned musculature can be freed and are able to expand, transforming tight and solid tissue masses into more beneficial soft tissue mass that can support the efficient flow of good and bad body resources. Proper alignment of the musculature and body's delivery system enables strength, endurance and healing to be readily and optimally accessible.
As the practitioner moves from pose to pose or as time is spent in a single pose for study and endurance, the opportunity for sliding of the foundation forming body parts can occur. This sliding action is the result of uncontrolled force and body weight collapsing onto the yoga mat.
Yoga mats normally have a surface that provides some level of grip to the parts of the practitioner's body that contact the mat. This grip provides security and can reduce, minimize, or prevent the practitioner from sliding out of poses, once they believe they have created their optimum pose shape. Conventional wisdom is that the more grip the surface of the mat provides the better the yoga mat performs. This higher grip level, however, provides a false sense of security that promotes bad habits and poor pose-creating behaviors. While the higher grip level makes it easier for beginners to hold attempted poses, the promotion of poor pose-creating behaviors provide opportunities for habits to develop that can lead to injury.
In particular, yoga mats with high grip levels give the practitioner a false sense of security because it holds the practitioner in a pose whether it is well constructed or not. While slippage is prevented, the sense of ease and personal strength is compromised. When using yoga mats with high grip levels, the practitioners do not need to understand the laws of friction and motion that affect the biomechanics of the body while the practitioners create yoga poses.
Further, yoga mats that are generally available today do not provide feedback to the practitioner of optimal biomechanics and placements of body parts that form foundations of respective yoga poses that can help teach the practitioner the proper positions and placements of such body parts to increase ease and endurance for the poses requested of a yoga practice. As a result, often injury and excessive straining occurs as practitioners force themselves into poses which would be easier and safer if the foundations were broad & solid to cause connective tissues to align that allows the muscles to distribute evenly around its connecting bone structure.
Therefore, a need exists for exercise mats and exercise mat systems that better promote correct posture and poses and optimal weight distribution and promote quality of pressure of foundational body parts of the practitioners to increase the benefits provided by yoga and decrease the likelihood of injury.